Slate has a cool article up about Hollywood’s relentless portrayal of biking people as dweebs and losers. It’s not something I’ve really thought about before but reading through the article I realize, hey, they’re totally right. I can’t remember a recent film where someone got around by bike who wasn’t a total sad sack.

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The Slate piece points to the Ben Stiller flick Greenberg, along with Napoleon Dynamite, Jason Schwartzman’s neurotic character in I Heart Huckabees, Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day and, of course, Pee Wee Herman to point out that, according to Hollywood, bikes are only ridden by the dependent and the insane:

Greenberg is just the most recent film in which a character’s non-automobility—whether for lack of a car or for lack of the ability to drive—is used for comic effect, whether as a metaphor for a deeper personality flaw or as a token of marginality and/or plain creepiness. As the humorist Art Buchwald once observed, “People are broad-minded. They’ll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn’t drive, there’s something wrong with him.”

I didn’t ride a bike all through high school even though my flat, sunny, small hometown would have been perfect for biking to school. A big reason why I didn’t ride was image. Who biked to school? Dweeby boy scouts, in my recollection. Driving a car (even a piece of shit car) was essential to being a socially acceptable high school human.

Sarah Shay Mirk reported on transportation, sex and gender issues, and politics at the Mercury from 2008-2013. They have gone on to make many things, including countless comics and several books.

23 replies on “Not Having a Car Makes You an Anti-Sex Symbol”

  1. That’s funny because I know guys in high school who refused to date anyone who wasn’t a vegan fixie rider. Three guesses as to where I grew up.

  3. Of course, we know the exception to Slate’s thesis is the 1979 classic “Breaking Away”. (Which also showed in this year’s Parks & Rec Movies in the Park series)

  7. Qucksilver BLAH BLAH BLAH. American Flyers is the better movie. Mostly because Kevin Costner starts bleeding from the ears about two miles from where I grew up.

  8. Graham, PAC – those movies don’t count (as much) because they are about bicyclists, rather than merely including a character who rides a bike.

  10. @ROM

    Okay, man. What about E.T.? Eliot was a hero and he rode a bicycle and E.T. even made it fly, and… and…

    Wait? What the hell am I doing commenting on Blogtown on my day off? JESUS!

  14. Jim from “28 Days Later” is a bike messenger. That’s… all I’ve got. I would have said Ferris Bueller, but he’s pretty bitter about his lack of car, isn’t he?

  15. I only knew one person who rode a bike to school in my semirural, bike-unfriendly hometown. He was, needless to say, the single biggest dork in a three-county radius. He was also madly in love with me. What can I say, I’ve always attracted the nerds that even nerds call nerds. (With apologies to my gently nerdy yet socially competent husband.)

  17. In my middle-class suburb, the bike went into the garage, never to return, when you were 12 or 13. It was all about turning 16 and getting your license, and becoming almost a man (though you still really shouldn’t try to grow a mustache until you’re older).

    And if you were over 16 and didn’t have a car (and were a guy), you didn’t date, period. Got no money, got no car, got no woman – there you are.

    Thankfully, we’re here in Portland, where crappy fixed-gear bikes can cost more than the beater that would get you a girlfriend in high school.

  19. Riding bikes in busy city streets or through vast open spaces does look comical and absurd. This PC bullshit wastes everybody’s time. The actual problem is funding priorities not Hollywood screenwriters.

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